How much does it cost to develop an app?

Surely, this is the question many of you have ever asked yourself before planning a mobile app development project. The mobile applications market is becoming one of the most powerful and billionaires markets, it’s enough to see the funding of start-ups based in apps.. That is what makes this sector has attracted the interest of many entrepreneurs to get into this world. Although you can find posts related to this topic everyday, we will tell you which factors involved in the process of developing an app and how it affects the price.To know more about how much it costs to develop a mobile app, first we are going to show you how many types of apps exist and what could be its approximate price depending on the staff of the developer company who can participate in its development and the technology used. From low to high price:

Apps based in advertising: These applications are designed to advertise a specific campaign or promotion of a fixed duration. Since they have a short period of life we don’t involve too much on their development, so we need a good designer and a generalist programmer, he does not need to be specialized. The price will be around $4500 – $6500 for both platforms, although it will depends on the final quality of it.

Native apps: In this case, we consider applications without back-end in which, apart from having a longer period of life, can also integrate functions like email, social networks, geolocation, among others. These applications require much more involvement of workers because they need a base and designs solid that can be expanded with a view to future. This development needs the participation of a good Android engineer (who will develop in Java), an iOS engineer (for developing in Objective-C) and a designer who has experience in this area. The degree of participation of each of them will depend on the objectives and customer needs. The price range between $6500 – $18000. The final price will be based on the size of the application and customer requests (if you want a simple design or architecture, for example).

Databases or management apps (such as Social network): In this type of development, the careful design and base app are very important. In these apps no resource is spared. Such applications require a total involvement of experienced professionals to avoid any error in the application development that tends to include backend engineers (for database and web services), frontend engineers (for web layout), Android engineer and iOS engineer for native apps. These apps may include content, image editing, sound, writing, etc. Approximate price: between $18000 – $8500 depending on the size of the app, features and UX effects. We should request this type of apps to specialists in this sector because it is difficult to find a only person who masters all the technologies required for this development.

Hybrid apps: In general, and as a estimate, we can consider that developing a hybrid app is in a price range of between 65% and 80% of the development of a native application for Android and iOS, depending on the functionalities we can develop in a hybrid way (HTML5) and which can be developed in native language specifically for each system. Generally, these apps will have an inferior quality and performance than the native apps.
Games mobile development: This is the most complicated case because games can be very expensive depending on the backend, art and technology in which it is programmed. It’s completely different develope a game with, for example, the Phaser framework and it is a 2D game than develope a 3D game with Unity3D, so that the variation in delivery time and cost of development is enormous. As a guideline, games that have been successful such as the Real Racing 3, has cost millions of euros at its base development. Our development team includes artists, designers, Unity specialists engineers and engineers Backend.

As you can see, according to how many engineers involved in the app development, the price can change. Depending on their degree of specialization and the number of hours invested in the development, the final price will be established. One of the participant in this process is a Back-End engineer who will develop the structure of the app; a graphic designer who, as you can imagine, is responsible for deciding the visual aspect and usability of the application and one or more programmers who will built content in the application. At this point, we must distinguish the platform for which we want our app, as there will be a specialist engineer in each of them (Android, iOS, Windows Phone …)

It’s difficult to give you an exact price because it will depends on many different variables. The final price depends entirely on the functionality and how innovative app seeks to be. It is very important that if you want that your app has a view to the future and prospects of recovering the investment, value the experience of development team in planning, design and programming so that they develop your idea reducing to the minimum the margin of error. And, of course, they must give you guarantees.

If you are interested in developing a mobile application do not hesitate to contact us, we will advise and help you in everything you need.